However, this second edition of the book has some weaknesses that may or may not have been introduced since the first edition...
This begins a 160 word paragraph going on about: - "that" in place of "who" - ambiguous uses of first-person - inconsistency in indenting - excessive whitespace
Are you kidding me? This is the most significant criticism you have of the book? This? Sure, stumbling upon standard high-school essay editing mistakes in a published work is a pain. But geez, summarize it briefly and move on. I nearly fell asleep reading that paragraph. I mean, look the discussion of whitespace:
Also, every instance of a "{" on its own line (presumably to line up vertically with the corresponding "}"), is an antiquated waste of space, since any decent programmer's editor or integrated development environment (IDE) can do brace matching automatically.
In 2007, when reviewing a programming book for a programmer's website, do we really need to say "integrated development environment (IDE)"? Will "IDE" really not suffice?
And someone should do some style editing on the reviewer. Even in high school I would have gotten crucified for beginning three subsequent sentences with "Firstly", "Secondly", and "Thirdly".
I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive
On the other hand, Europe takes it "the initiator pays" to a degree that might be considered extreme to North American tastes: when calling a European cell number, you pay much, much more than you would when calling a European landline. (This is the case in France and Italy at least.)
When I learned this a couple years ago, the difference in price was a factor of 10. Of course, with Skype now this aspect of things is not such a problem.
Actually, most scientific papers I see are disseminated as PostScript (often with a PDF option for people without ghostscript or similar installed - basically, non-academics).
Perhaps it depends on the field. In my experience, in computer science all recent papers are provided either as PDF alone or PDF + PostScript, and in my (very limited) experience with refereed publications, PDF is the accepted standard.
PDF has a lot of advantages over PostScript, the most obvious of which is internal hyperlinks.
My former company (a producer of math software) had a once-a-month onsite subsidized massage service. When I asked about it once, our HR person made a special point of emphasizing it was a chair massage, done over regular work clothes. Apparently they had once done a table massage (also over clothes) and there was some complaints that it the table made it "weird".
But hey, all the power to 'em. I think people that uptight are likely the ones who need a massage the most.
Care to tell me why Google should feel "bad" about not celebrating (if you can call it celebrating) a holiday nobody outside the US cares about? Or rather, why should they be "forced" to consider some national holiday important?
Well, Google is under absolutely no obligation to do this, so in no case should they feel "bad" or "forced".
But in the past they have done logo changes for nation-specific events, because outside the U.S. you're automatically redirected to google.[countrycode]. For example, on July 1 in Canada, Google.ca has a Canada Day theme. They also commemorate Remembrance Day on November 11 in the Commonwealth countries: as another poster said, though, I think this is more about Remembrance Day having a much clearer visual branding (poppies) than Veterans Day has.
She did not (so far as I know) use her fame in her primary field (acting) to get preferential treatment in the other (science/maths.)
Well, I'm sure she did not, because how would that even work! "Umm, look, I'm a famous celebrity! Please add me as a co-author on numerous academic papers so that I can be a famous academic as well!"
Academia has its flaws, but obsession with celebrity culture is thankfully not one of them!
Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.
I seriously doubt it. Apache has supported rewrite rules (that would allow you to rewrite some URL as a GET request) since at least 2000 or so, probably before.
Hell, isgay.com had dynamic page dispatch by subdomain working back in 2000-2001!
The problem is that rational environmentalism has seemingly fallen to the wayside to be replaced by anti-globalization activists (who use the technology they decry in order to organize) and luddites who want to get rid of all technology after period X (where X equals their idea of the human ideal).
Wow, those are some very broad strokes! Try a thinner paintbrush; the lines will come out a lot cleaner.
In the mid-90s Yahoo! pared down every variable and path in their HTML to get the minimum document size and thus fastest loading.
"Variable and path" in HTML? What are you talking about?
Anyway, Yahoo's site started off relatively small in '95 or so, as most sites were then. But as I remember it, they were one of the first to unleash those bloated late-nineties "portal" sites, complete with stock ticker, 14-day forecast, and the latest celebrity gossip.
I hardly think they were terribly concerned about fast loading, and in any case removing a few redundant open and closing tags almost never appreciably reduces loading-time, because that is not where the bottleneck is.
Then where do the REST of the Canadian tax money go? Canadians pay less per GDP than Americans on health, yet they pay more per GDP on tax. Not to mention that Canada has a way smaller army to support than USA
Well, in addition to the infrastructure argument the other poster made, there is the following point:
Because Canada's healthcare system is public, it is financed by tax. The American system is financed to a much lesser extent.
Americans pay more for health, but they pay through HMO fees (or employer pay clawbacks to subsidize HMO fees) not through tax.
I don't think you could convince me that there isn't any fat to be trimmed out of the healthcare system, either.
Personally, I'm trying like hell to keep a system like your Canadian Socialized Medicine out of my country (the good ol' USA), so it doesn't bankrupt us. Don't want to make the downfall of our Government take place any faster than it already is!
You couldn't convince me, either. I'm sure there is tons of fat to be trimmed out of the Canadian healthcare system. This is true of any large institution.
But there is way way more to be trimmed out of private healthcare. Why wouldn't there be, when you need to replicate an entirely separate organizational infrastructure for each HMO?
Think about all the paper-pushers you don't have to hire with a single unified system! Think about how much doctors make per hour, and think about how much you're saving when these doctors don't have to take the time to figure out the precise levels of coverage from the patient's specific HMO, determine the best treatment for their budget and plan, and navigate some weird HMO-specific form! Instead you have a consistent level of coverage for everything and a standardized process for all patients. Lastly, think about the virtue of preventative maintenance. Comprehensive coverage means people can get that ache or pain treated that would lead to something serious.
The public system is my heritage as a Canadian and all us Canadians obviously hear a lot of chest-thumping by our politicians and others about its superiority. I have never had to pull out my credit card at a hospital, and I don't know what the American system is really like.
I also believe that capitalistic competition has a great deal of benefit most of the time. But with the arguments above, even after all my disclaimers, I can't possibly see how the private system could be defended except out of ignorance or a misplaced faith in competition being a good thing always.
That's odd, because his books were openly critical of socialism.
No, that's the interpretation commonly assigned to his writing by people who have only ever read 1984 and Animal Farm.
He was opposed to totalitarianism and Stalinism, but was a self-described Socialist to the end. As Bernard Crick wrote about him:
Some either ignore his socialism or espouse a legend that by 1948 and in Nineteen Eighty-Four he had abandoned it -- what one may call the Time-Life and Encounter view of Orwell. Part of his anger against the Communists was not only that they had become despots who squandered human life and despised liberty, but that they were also discrediting democratic Socialism. There is really no mystery about the general character of his politics. From 1936 onwards he was first a follower of the independent Labour Party and then a Tribune socialist; that is, he took his stand among those who were to the Left or on the left of the Labour Party: fiercely egalitarian, libertarian and democratic, but by Continental comparisons, surprisingly untheoretical, a congregation of secular evangelicals.
So, I'm not the AC you're replying to, but in the interests of clearing some things up.
Jews have been living in "Palestine" since before it was renamed from Judea to Palestina.
Very true... the Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine has been continuous since Biblical times. Nevertheless the fact that a minority Jewish presence has been continuously there is not in itself an argument for why there should be an official Jewish state there. There has been a minority Christian population since the Muslim conquest, and I think we can agree that anyone arguing for an established Christian state in Israel/Palestine would be crazy.
The special claim of the Jews to Israel, over other groups, is because Israel was the original Jewish homeland. But this means supporting a claim to a "homeland" over centuries if not millenia.
But as the 1929 Pogroms indicate, attacking the Jews in "Palestina" pre-dates Israel.
I'm not sure how the fact that a pogrom occurred is an argument for a Jewish state. Should there have been a Jewish state in the Ukraine, since there were pogroms there? Or perhaps you just trying to argue that the Palestinians are bad people?
In that case, it's a bit unfair to cite the pogrom without any historical context. There was significant Jewish emigration, mostly Ashkenazi, in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries as the Zionist movement became popular in Europe and America. The arrival of these newcomers exacerbated tensions between the Jewish and Muslim communities, as arrivals of newcomers generally do. These doesn't justify pogroms or attacks on either side (and there were attacks from and against both) but it shows that the Muslims weren't uniquely the evildoers in this historical setting.
When Jews were fleeing WWII to Palestine, local Arab riots and rebellions prevents Jews from escaping there. Those escaping weren't "stealing" land, they were moving to collective farms of Jews that BOUGHT the land from the previous owners. Sure they didn't buy ALL the land, but Jews weren't stealing them.
Ahh, you've done some impressive mental gymnastics here in your effort to justify theft.
"Sure they didn't buy ALL the land, but Jews weren't stealing them." Really? If I acquire something of yours without buying it, and you don't want me to have it, how is that not "stealing"?
Israel didn't found it's state with Terrorism. It was granted permission to form by UN Decree, and permission to be settled by Mandate from the League of Nations.
Oh, come on. Even Israeli academics would not be pushing this ridiculous BS. Of course, there was a peaceful movement for the establishment of Israel, but there was a violent and -- dare I say -- terroristic aspect to it as well, for which there is indisputable proof.
The decrees came as a result of the context created by the Zionist movement in Israel, one aspect of which was violent. To argue that the decrees just came out of nowhere and are not a product of the previous Zionist struggle is actually an egregious insult to the name of the people who passionately believed in Zionism and fought for it. Are you going to tell me that Menachim Begin was not involved in the founding of Israel, because it came from a UN decree?
The facts simply don't bear out your anti-Israel, anti-Semetic, and anti-Western diatribe.
Had to go with the usual end-with-the-labels, huh? But I see "anti-Western" is added in there... rounds it out nicely, doesn't it? (The only saving grace is that I guess you haven't had too much experience tossing "anti-Semitic" around as a casual unjustified insult, since you can't spell it properly.)
Uh, buddy... the Israelis took most of that land from the Palestinians in the sixties and seventies. I was there. Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean nobody does.
You completely misunderstood my point. It was not that no one alive remembers the Jews taking Palestine — that is obviously false — but that no one alive remembers the original taking of Israel/Palestine from the Jews.
Really by the time there are no living humans with memory of an event, it's time to stop demanding retribution/reparations/repayment/etc.
A reasonable argument.
So, following this logic, perhaps the Israelis should give back the land they took from the Palestinians? (Since the crux of the claim of the entire Jewish diaspora to that territory dates from before the diaspora was established, millennia ago.)
As for the other three, Northern Ireland, Quebec, and Hawaii:
Hawaii is actually a better example than you might think, or at least it was in 1893. In the time since it has been so thoroughly integrated and Americanized that it is no longer comparable to someplace like Tibet.
As for Quebec and Northern Ireland: remind me again when it was that the Tibetans had an free and fair referendum on their continued union with China?
I never argued the comparisons were exact. The OP's main arguments seemed to be that as an imperialist power China should be expected to cling to its colony, and that they had done some good there as the past Tibet was a feudal state which exploited its peasant class.
Those arguments — the duty of the imperialist to quash dissent and the good works done for the colony once part of an empire — hold in the examples I provided too. So I wanted to see whether the OP agreed with the principles (a consistent imperialist) or whether he had some particular nationalistic axe to grind.
But let's visit your arguments nonetheless.
1. The British East India Company didn't set out to re-assimilate a previous province of England by creating the British Raj; they sought goods for trade and the expansion of power of the Crown.
I think the incentive for their being there is sort of beside the point. The crux of your argument is the "previous province" business. I'll leave aside the question of the veracity of that point, but even if it's true, so what? Ireland is a previous province of the UK; for that matter, so is Canada. Would it be okay for Gordon Brown to fly to Ottawa or Dublin and ask for an Act of Union, as long as he wasn't doing it for the natural resources?
2. The Soviets didn't want to return the Eastern Bloc to Russia. Ever since Napoleon and perhaps previously, Russia wanted a (larger) buffer between herself and European powers who constantly invaded her traditional territory.
See, there we go with "traditional territory". What are "traditional territory" or "buffer states" other than empire? Maybe "empire lite", where we get a local stooge to man the podium for the sake of the local crowd?
Czechoslovakia was actually a separate country, and there was no systemic effort on the Russians' part to replace Czech or Slovak with Russian. (Mind you, they did force some other Eastern Bloc states to convert to the Cyrillic alphabet.) So it is a weaker form of imperialism than Tibet; in Tibet a guy like Alexander Dubek couldn't have ever even got started.
3. I can't speak intelligently about Belgian intentions in the Congo, I'd wager the diamond and gold mines had more to do with it than anything.
Again with this strange idea that because the motives for colonialism were resource-based, that this somehow invalidates the comparison. Why?
4. The United States gained the Philippines, a Spanish colony, after defeating Spain in a war. No manifest destiny there, just a transfer of stewardship.
Okay. So, after the war was over, a bunch of the Filipinos sought independence. The United States, a country founded on the right to national self-determination who had spent the last century preaching to the world about its moralistic principles, launched an oppressive and brutal campaign to secure the Philippines as a colony, complete with racist rhetoric about how the Asians weren't ready for freedom and need American tutelage. And they did mention manifest destiny, by the way!
But your "transfer of stewardship" argument is interesting. So if I get the colony from some other empire, that makes it okay, and somehow not imperialism? How would this work for stolen goods?
The British empire, the Soviet Union and the Belgian colonies - all have failed, and with good reason.
They failed, but before they failed, people were using arguments similar to yours to explain why they shouldn't or wouldn't fail.
What is this stupid substition game about, really, other than silly?
Well, it's about finding out how consistent an apologist for imperialism you are. Judging by your response, fairly consistent.
Are you suggesting that China are like the British, when they invaded India and tried to suck the country dry of its natural riches? And that people come from Beijing and set up their own little 'kingdoms' in Tibet?
I'm not suggesting the comparison goes any further than empire and colony. The Chinese haven't set up their own little kingdoms, no, but what difference does it make whether they have petty fiefdoms or a centralized state bureaucracy? They're still there.
And you seem oddly harsh against British imperialism in India. Many of the positive changes you've described in Tibet since Chinese rule have parallels in India: the British gave Western technology, schools, trains, a solid legal system, etc. Sure they took their raw materials, but that's what an empire's supposed to do, right?
What I say is - wake up to reality. There is a lot of shit going on in the world, but some is worse than other.
Moral relativism. There's rule of existence out there that I like to call the Axiom of Suckiness: "if A sucks, but B sucks more than A, then A still sucks."
Sure there's worse shit out there. Who says I don't care about that too?
I don't think the Americans in the Philippines or the Chinese in Tibet are anyway near as big problems as the situations in Africa, or the fact that Israel is caught in a state of near psychosis that makes it almost impossible to get anywhere with solving the problems.
Well, agreed there. But refer to the Axiom of Suckiness again.
By the way, when I mention the "Philippines" I was talking about the period where it was an American protectorate in the nineteenth century, right after the Spanish-American War. This was one of the first times the cognitive dissonance of the U.S. government was on full display: "we're a people whose existence was founded on a principle of a right to national self-determination, but the Filipinos need us to rule them, and if they think otherwise they just don't understand."
Here's some background: Whether you like the Chinese government or not, and whether you feel that they are wrongfully occupying Tibet or not, the fact is that they feel that this is their territory, and nobody in the world offers any serious challenge; ergo, Tibet is de facto a part of China. Nobody in their right mind would expect a country to allow an external, hostile, political power to influence the internal affairs of the country - the US have historically been very heavyhanded in similar situations (eg. the communist scare after WWII); many would still today argue that it was right of them.
Here are some suggested substitutions to your text: 1. Replace "Chinese" with "British", "China" with "the British Empire", "Tibet" with "India". 2. Replace "Chinese" with "Soviet", "China" with "the USSR", "Tibet" with "Czechoslovakia". 3. Replace "Chinese" with "Belgian", "China" with "Belgium", "Tibet" with "the Congo". 4. Replace "Chinese" with "American", "China" with "the USA", "Tibet" with "the Philippines".
Which of these would you still defend? If not all, which ones and why not?
Afterwards, some monks read a prophecy he wrote- or some other instructions- and go off and find a kid who was born a while after he died.
And not just any old monks. The Panchen Lama holds a huge amount of sway in who is chosen as the next Dalai Lama. This explains the whole interference of the Chinese government in disappearing Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and appointing Qoigyijabu as the 11th Panchen Lama: they have a long-term strategy of ensuring all hereditary Tibetan leaders are their puppets.
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However, this second edition of the book has some weaknesses that may or may not have been introduced since the first edition...
This begins a 160 word paragraph going on about:
- "that" in place of "who"
- ambiguous uses of first-person
- inconsistency in indenting
- excessive whitespace
Are you kidding me? This is the most significant criticism you have of the book? This? Sure, stumbling upon standard high-school essay editing mistakes in a published work is a pain. But geez, summarize it briefly and move on. I nearly fell asleep reading that paragraph. I mean, look the discussion of whitespace:
Also, every instance of a "{" on its own line (presumably to line up vertically with the corresponding "}"), is an antiquated waste of space, since any decent programmer's editor or integrated development environment (IDE) can do brace matching automatically.
In 2007, when reviewing a programming book for a programmer's website, do we really need to say "integrated development environment (IDE)"? Will "IDE" really not suffice?
And someone should do some style editing on the reviewer. Even in high school I would have gotten crucified for beginning three subsequent sentences with "Firstly", "Secondly", and "Thirdly".
I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive
On the other hand, Europe takes it "the initiator pays" to a degree that might be considered extreme to North American tastes: when calling a European cell number, you pay much, much more than you would when calling a European landline. (This is the case in France and Italy at least.)
When I learned this a couple years ago, the difference in price was a factor of 10. Of course, with Skype now this aspect of things is not such a problem.
Actually, most scientific papers I see are disseminated as PostScript (often with a PDF option for people without ghostscript or similar installed - basically, non-academics).
Perhaps it depends on the field. In my experience, in computer science all recent papers are provided either as PDF alone or PDF + PostScript, and in my (very limited) experience with refereed publications, PDF is the accepted standard.
PDF has a lot of advantages over PostScript, the most obvious of which is internal hyperlinks.
My former company (a producer of math software) had a once-a-month onsite subsidized massage service. When I asked about it once, our HR person made a special point of emphasizing it was a chair massage, done over regular work clothes. Apparently they had once done a table massage (also over clothes) and there was some complaints that it the table made it "weird".
But hey, all the power to 'em. I think people that uptight are likely the ones who need a massage the most.
Care to tell me why Google should feel "bad" about not celebrating (if you can call it celebrating) a holiday nobody outside the US cares about? Or rather, why should they be "forced" to consider some national holiday important?
Well, Google is under absolutely no obligation to do this, so in no case should they feel "bad" or "forced".
But in the past they have done logo changes for nation-specific events, because outside the U.S. you're automatically redirected to google.[countrycode]. For example, on July 1 in Canada, Google.ca has a Canada Day theme. They also commemorate Remembrance Day on November 11 in the Commonwealth countries: as another poster said, though, I think this is more about Remembrance Day having a much clearer visual branding (poppies) than Veterans Day has.
She did not (so far as I know) use her fame in her primary field (acting) to get preferential treatment in the other (science/maths.)
Well, I'm sure she did not, because how would that even work! "Umm, look, I'm a famous celebrity! Please add me as a co-author on numerous academic papers so that I can be a famous academic as well!"
Academia has its flaws, but obsession with celebrity culture is thankfully not one of them!
Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.
I seriously doubt it. Apache has supported rewrite rules (that would allow you to rewrite some URL as a GET request) since at least 2000 or so, probably before.
Hell, isgay.com had dynamic page dispatch by subdomain working back in 2000-2001!
The problem is that rational environmentalism has seemingly fallen to the wayside to be replaced by anti-globalization activists (who use the technology they decry in order to organize) and luddites who want to get rid of all technology after period X (where X equals their idea of the human ideal).
Wow, those are some very broad strokes! Try a thinner paintbrush; the lines will come out a lot cleaner.
In the mid-90s Yahoo! pared down every variable and path in their HTML to get the minimum document size and thus fastest loading.
"Variable and path" in HTML? What are you talking about?
Anyway, Yahoo's site started off relatively small in '95 or so, as most sites were then. But as I remember it, they were one of the first to unleash those bloated late-nineties "portal" sites, complete with stock ticker, 14-day forecast, and the latest celebrity gossip.
I hardly think they were terribly concerned about fast loading, and in any case removing a few redundant open and closing tags almost never appreciably reduces loading-time, because that is not where the bottleneck is.
3. safe - nobody around for miles
Um... I guess you forgot about the polar bears?
Then where do the REST of the Canadian tax money go? Canadians pay less per GDP than Americans on health, yet they pay more per GDP on tax. Not to mention that Canada has a way smaller army to support than USA
Well, in addition to the infrastructure argument the other poster made, there is the following point:
Because Canada's healthcare system is public, it is financed by tax. The American system is financed to a much lesser extent.
Americans pay more for health, but they pay through HMO fees (or employer pay clawbacks to subsidize HMO fees) not through tax.
I don't think you could convince me that there isn't any fat to be trimmed out of the healthcare system, either.
Personally, I'm trying like hell to keep a system like your Canadian Socialized Medicine out of my country (the good ol' USA), so it doesn't bankrupt us. Don't want to make the downfall of our Government take place any faster than it already is!
You couldn't convince me, either. I'm sure there is tons of fat to be trimmed out of the Canadian healthcare system. This is true of any large institution.
But there is way way more to be trimmed out of private healthcare. Why wouldn't there be, when you need to replicate an entirely separate organizational infrastructure for each HMO?
The best demonstration of this is the fact that Canadians pay less per GDP than Americans on health care.
Think about all the paper-pushers you don't have to hire with a single unified system! Think about how much doctors make per hour, and think about how much you're saving when these doctors don't have to take the time to figure out the precise levels of coverage from the patient's specific HMO, determine the best treatment for their budget and plan, and navigate some weird HMO-specific form! Instead you have a consistent level of coverage for everything and a standardized process for all patients. Lastly, think about the virtue of preventative maintenance. Comprehensive coverage means people can get that ache or pain treated that would lead to something serious.
The public system is my heritage as a Canadian and all us Canadians obviously hear a lot of chest-thumping by our politicians and others about its superiority. I have never had to pull out my credit card at a hospital, and I don't know what the American system is really like.
I also believe that capitalistic competition has a great deal of benefit most of the time. But with the arguments above, even after all my disclaimers, I can't possibly see how the private system could be defended except out of ignorance or a misplaced faith in competition being a good thing always.
No, that's the interpretation commonly assigned to his writing by people who have only ever read 1984 and Animal Farm.
He was opposed to totalitarianism and Stalinism, but was a self-described Socialist to the end. As Bernard Crick wrote about him:
(though one wonders if you were so well read, how would you become a socialist...)
Orwell was pretty well read too, and he was a socialist to his dying day.
So, I'm not the AC you're replying to, but in the interests of clearing some things up.
Jews have been living in "Palestine" since before it was renamed from Judea to Palestina.
Very true... the Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine has been continuous since Biblical times. Nevertheless the fact that a minority Jewish presence has been continuously there is not in itself an argument for why there should be an official Jewish state there. There has been a minority Christian population since the Muslim conquest, and I think we can agree that anyone arguing for an established Christian state in Israel/Palestine would be crazy.
The special claim of the Jews to Israel, over other groups, is because Israel was the original Jewish homeland. But this means supporting a claim to a "homeland" over centuries if not millenia.
But as the 1929 Pogroms indicate, attacking the Jews in "Palestina" pre-dates Israel.
I'm not sure how the fact that a pogrom occurred is an argument for a Jewish state. Should there have been a Jewish state in the Ukraine, since there were pogroms there? Or perhaps you just trying to argue that the Palestinians are bad people?
In that case, it's a bit unfair to cite the pogrom without any historical context. There was significant Jewish emigration, mostly Ashkenazi, in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries as the Zionist movement became popular in Europe and America. The arrival of these newcomers exacerbated tensions between the Jewish and Muslim communities, as arrivals of newcomers generally do. These doesn't justify pogroms or attacks on either side (and there were attacks from and against both) but it shows that the Muslims weren't uniquely the evildoers in this historical setting.
When Jews were fleeing WWII to Palestine, local Arab riots and rebellions prevents Jews from escaping there. Those escaping weren't "stealing" land, they were moving to collective farms of Jews that BOUGHT the land from the previous owners. Sure they didn't buy ALL the land, but Jews weren't stealing them.
Ahh, you've done some impressive mental gymnastics here in your effort to justify theft.
"Sure they didn't buy ALL the land, but Jews weren't stealing them." Really? If I acquire something of yours without buying it, and you don't want me to have it, how is that not "stealing"?
Israel didn't found it's state with Terrorism. It was granted permission to form by UN Decree, and permission to be settled by Mandate from the League of Nations.
Oh, come on. Even Israeli academics would not be pushing this ridiculous BS. Of course, there was a peaceful movement for the establishment of Israel, but there was a violent and -- dare I say -- terroristic aspect to it as well, for which there is indisputable proof.
The decrees came as a result of the context created by the Zionist movement in Israel, one aspect of which was violent. To argue that the decrees just came out of nowhere and are not a product of the previous Zionist struggle is actually an egregious insult to the name of the people who passionately believed in Zionism and fought for it. Are you going to tell me that Menachim Begin was not involved in the founding of Israel, because it came from a UN decree?
The facts simply don't bear out your anti-Israel, anti-Semetic, and anti-Western diatribe.
Had to go with the usual end-with-the-labels, huh? But I see "anti-Western" is added in there... rounds it out nicely, doesn't it? (The only saving grace is that I guess you haven't had too much experience tossing "anti-Semitic" around as a casual unjustified insult, since you can't spell it properly.)
Uh, buddy... the Israelis took most of that land from the Palestinians in the sixties and seventies. I was there. Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean nobody does.
You completely misunderstood my point. It was not that no one alive remembers the Jews taking Palestine — that is obviously false — but that no one alive remembers the original taking of Israel/Palestine from the Jews.
Really by the time there are no living humans with memory of an event, it's time to stop demanding retribution/reparations/repayment/etc.
A reasonable argument.
So, following this logic, perhaps the Israelis should give back the land they took from the Palestinians? (Since the crux of the claim of the entire Jewish diaspora to that territory dates from before the diaspora was established, millennia ago.)
The above post is not flamebait!
The Panchen Lama is not a hereditary position; he is a Tulku
Sorry, yes. Hereditary is the wrong word. I guess I have gotten in the habit of equating "hereditary" with "unelected".
The Czechoslovakia one was on my list too.
As for the other three, Northern Ireland, Quebec, and Hawaii:
Hawaii is actually a better example than you might think, or at least it was in 1893. In the time since it has been so thoroughly integrated and Americanized that it is no longer comparable to someplace like Tibet.
As for Quebec and Northern Ireland: remind me again when it was that the Tibetans had an free and fair referendum on their continued union with China?
I think that this was about an example that I raised, so I'll address it.
No, the poster was replying to an AC who replied to my post. The AC mentioned Northern Ireland, Quebec, and Hawaii.
I never argued the comparisons were exact. The OP's main arguments seemed to be that as an imperialist power China should be expected to cling to its colony, and that they had done some good there as the past Tibet was a feudal state which exploited its peasant class.
Those arguments — the duty of the imperialist to quash dissent and the good works done for the colony once part of an empire — hold in the examples I provided too. So I wanted to see whether the OP agreed with the principles (a consistent imperialist) or whether he had some particular nationalistic axe to grind.
But let's visit your arguments nonetheless.
1. The British East India Company didn't set out to re-assimilate a previous province of England by creating the British Raj; they sought goods for trade and the expansion of power of the Crown.
I think the incentive for their being there is sort of beside the point. The crux of your argument is the "previous province" business. I'll leave aside the question of the veracity of that point, but even if it's true, so what? Ireland is a previous province of the UK; for that matter, so is Canada. Would it be okay for Gordon Brown to fly to Ottawa or Dublin and ask for an Act of Union, as long as he wasn't doing it for the natural resources?
2. The Soviets didn't want to return the Eastern Bloc to Russia. Ever since Napoleon and perhaps previously, Russia wanted a (larger) buffer between herself and European powers who constantly invaded her traditional territory.
See, there we go with "traditional territory". What are "traditional territory" or "buffer states" other than empire? Maybe "empire lite", where we get a local stooge to man the podium for the sake of the local crowd?
Czechoslovakia was actually a separate country, and there was no systemic effort on the Russians' part to replace Czech or Slovak with Russian. (Mind you, they did force some other Eastern Bloc states to convert to the Cyrillic alphabet.) So it is a weaker form of imperialism than Tibet; in Tibet a guy like Alexander Dubek couldn't have ever even got started.
3. I can't speak intelligently about Belgian intentions in the Congo, I'd wager the diamond and gold mines had more to do with it than anything.
Again with this strange idea that because the motives for colonialism were resource-based, that this somehow invalidates the comparison. Why?
4. The United States gained the Philippines, a Spanish colony, after defeating Spain in a war. No manifest destiny there, just a transfer of stewardship.
Okay. So, after the war was over, a bunch of the Filipinos sought independence. The United States, a country founded on the right to national self-determination who had spent the last century preaching to the world about its moralistic principles, launched an oppressive and brutal campaign to secure the Philippines as a colony, complete with racist rhetoric about how the Asians weren't ready for freedom and need American tutelage. And they did mention manifest destiny, by the way!
But your "transfer of stewardship" argument is interesting. So if I get the colony from some other empire, that makes it okay, and somehow not imperialism? How would this work for stolen goods?
The British empire, the Soviet Union and the Belgian colonies - all have failed, and with good reason.
They failed, but before they failed, people were using arguments similar to yours to explain why they shouldn't or wouldn't fail.
What is this stupid substition game about, really, other than silly?
Well, it's about finding out how consistent an apologist for imperialism you are. Judging by your response, fairly consistent.
Are you suggesting that China are like the British, when they invaded India and tried to suck the country dry of its natural riches? And that people come from Beijing and set up their own little 'kingdoms' in Tibet?
I'm not suggesting the comparison goes any further than empire and colony. The Chinese haven't set up their own little kingdoms, no, but what difference does it make whether they have petty fiefdoms or a centralized state bureaucracy? They're still there.
And you seem oddly harsh against British imperialism in India. Many of the positive changes you've described in Tibet since Chinese rule have parallels in India: the British gave Western technology, schools, trains, a solid legal system, etc. Sure they took their raw materials, but that's what an empire's supposed to do, right?
What I say is - wake up to reality. There is a lot of shit going on in the world, but some is worse than other.
Moral relativism. There's rule of existence out there that I like to call the Axiom of Suckiness: "if A sucks, but B sucks more than A, then A still sucks."
Sure there's worse shit out there. Who says I don't care about that too?
I don't think the Americans in the Philippines or the Chinese in Tibet are anyway near as big problems as the situations in Africa, or the fact that Israel is caught in a state of near psychosis that makes it almost impossible to get anywhere with solving the problems.
Well, agreed there. But refer to the Axiom of Suckiness again.
By the way, when I mention the "Philippines" I was talking about the period where it was an American protectorate in the nineteenth century, right after the Spanish-American War. This was one of the first times the cognitive dissonance of the U.S. government was on full display: "we're a people whose existence was founded on a principle of a right to national self-determination, but the Filipinos need us to rule them, and if they think otherwise they just don't understand."
Here's some background: Whether you like the Chinese government or not, and whether you feel that they are wrongfully occupying Tibet or not, the fact is that they feel that this is their territory, and nobody in the world offers any serious challenge; ergo, Tibet is de facto a part of China. Nobody in their right mind would expect a country to allow an external, hostile, political power to influence the internal affairs of the country - the US have historically been very heavyhanded in similar situations (eg. the communist scare after WWII); many would still today argue that it was right of them.
Here are some suggested substitutions to your text:
1. Replace "Chinese" with "British", "China" with "the British Empire", "Tibet" with "India".
2. Replace "Chinese" with "Soviet", "China" with "the USSR", "Tibet" with "Czechoslovakia".
3. Replace "Chinese" with "Belgian", "China" with "Belgium", "Tibet" with "the Congo".
4. Replace "Chinese" with "American", "China" with "the USA", "Tibet" with "the Philippines".
Which of these would you still defend? If not all, which ones and why not?
Afterwards, some monks read a prophecy he wrote- or some other instructions- and go off and find a kid who was born a while after he died.
And not just any old monks. The Panchen Lama holds a huge amount of sway in who is chosen as the next Dalai Lama. This explains the whole interference of the Chinese government in disappearing Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and appointing Qoigyijabu as the 11th Panchen Lama: they have a long-term strategy of ensuring all hereditary Tibetan leaders are their puppets.